Saturday, October 24, 2009

At work, I have this teambuilding activity that I facilitate, where teams of professionals try to build the tallest freestanding structure using obscure materials. We usually give them PlayDoh, post-it notes, paperclips, clothespins, and some other random items.

As I was thinking about activities for Maya's party, I thought I'd do a similar activity, though since I was dealing with four year olds, I'd simplify it by just using PlayDoh.

Um...yeah. NOT recommended. A little awkward. It turns out that the other materials are actually CRITICAL.

The kids were wondering why the adults were laughing so hard. Needless to say, this child won the contest.

Though it was rainy, Maya got an opportunity to take her new ATV for a test drive. She's officially unstoppable.

..then she spent a good deal of the afternoon doing this. ...and amazingly, she did not get injured.

Thursday, October 15, 2009

It's not easy to capture last weekend in four pictures, which is why I posted five.

The weather was perfection, which was really good news for Brandi, who was coming up for our Africa Party on Saturday night. Brandi lives in Florida and had never been to Maine before; she was excited to see the foliage - which we had plenty of...literally right in our own backyard.

Saturday morning the girls enjoyed dancing in the living room. With the furniture moved off to the side, it was really a perfect ballet studio...and of course, the girls took full advantage of this.

Saturday night the house was full of people enjoying the sights and tastes of Africa....and the beads. It was such an enjoyable evening and we raised enough money to fund a Ugandan teacher's salary for an entire year! It amazes me that two hours of shopping and sipping wine with girlfriends could have such an impact!

On Sunday, we did the two quintessential Maine tourist activities: 1) visited Nubble, and..

2) ate lobster.

It was such a great weekend - all around. Oh, and Amelle has her own take on the weekend as well, her blog is linked to the right.

Thursday, October 01, 2009

Wendy and I have been working on something fun that we're going to unleash at our 10/10 party, but if you're one of the four people who still faithfully follow this blog, you get to see it an advance.

We'll be selling super-cute baby and toddler t-shirts to benefit orphans. Each shirt is just $10, and 100% of the proceeds go to feeding orphans. They come with a tag that informs the recipient that through the purchase of each shirt, an orphan living in extreme poverty is fed for an entire month. Here are the initial shirt designs:

We'll also be selling cards and gift tags as well. Again, these feed orphans. Here are some of the design samples (they look better in person because these are on the design template, which is larger than the actual print area).

Here's a sample gift tag design. Don't you want these for your Christmas presents? These feed an orphan a meal. Yup, smart little suckers, aren't they? I am personally not accepting any gifts this year that do not have a Poverty Gift Tag on them. That's just how I roll.We had to laugh at ourselves yesterday because our whole vernacular has changed over the last few days. We say things like, "I'll send you the designs to proof", and "What do you think of this graphic?". We feel very artsy and cool. Of course, next week we'll be back to our regular dialog, "did you hear the croup is going around at daycare?", and "your daughter told me she had a spider crawling up her butt crack".

If you can't make it to our 10/10 party, but still want to get in on the t-shirts, gift tags, or cards, visit our Lobsters blog.